carapace – Not your father's america

Volume XVI No. 41: October 14, 2011

Political leaders tackling our budget mess should have visited the Washington Convention Center this week for a lesson on federal spending. The Association of the United States Army packed hundreds of exhibitors into two exposition halls the size of football fields at its annual convention, and companies from around the world came to sell the U.S. Army everything from mammoth tanks to micro-thin wires. Corporations such as Raytheon and KBR erected multi-level installations nearly big enough to generate their own zip code, complete with conference rooms and coffee bars.

In his address to the convention, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called sequestration, which would impose $600 billion in defense cuts if the Joint Select Deficit Reduction Committee (or Super Committee)’s $1.2 trillion in proposed reductions are not adopted by Congress, a "doomsday mechanism." Later in the week, Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA), who represents a district heavy with defense contractors, launched an initiative claiming that sequestration would "cause significant harm to United States interests." The initiative echoed a report released last month by the majority staff of the House Armed Services Committee that read like a list of campaign debate talking points—light on facts but replete with fear-mongering claims that reductions risked "increasing the threat of nuclear proliferation" as well as our ability to "adequately defend allies."

This all cleverly misses the point. Sequestration was meant to be the scary stick to get Congress to take the deficit cutting medicine. What big defense budget boosters are trying to do with this line of reasoning is to protect Pentagon spending in the Super Committee deliberations as well.

It’s no surprise that the Pentagon would scramble to protect its flank in these budget-cutting times, but the offense from Panetta, Congress, and industry is brazenly alarmist—and sometimes downright wrong. Panetta told Congress that sequestration would increase the country’s unemployment rate by 1 percent, despite absence of any evidence. And presumed GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney pledged in a speech to "reverse Obama’s massive defense cuts." But the defense budget has actually increased billions of dollars under President Barack Obama.

Let’s review some more facts. First of all, the $450 billion in defense cuts that the debt ceiling deal enacted would only lower the rate of increase in DOD’s budget, a rate that has gone through the roof in the last ten years. Even the "doomsday mechanism" would only bring DOD’s budget back down to the 2007 level—a pretty comfy one, considering war spending won’t be touched.

Second, our country faces a $1.3 trillion deficit, and every part of the government needs to step up and trim down. As consumer of the largest piece of our discretionary budget pie, the Defense Department cannot dodge its share, nor can tax expenditures, entitlements, and other discretionary spending. There’s certainly plenty of fat to cut at DOD: The agency buys more than $1 billion of goods and services every day; employs some three million people globally, more than the world’s largest corporation; and its headquarters, the Pentagon, is the world’s largest office building. If that doesn’t epitomize Big Government, we don’t know what does.

Finally, the chances of sequestration coming to pass are slim to none, and Forbes et al know it. Whatever the Super Committee produces, it will fall to Congress to adopt the recommendations or come up with some of their own. As we said, this full-court press on behalf of defense is likely an attempt to dissuade the committee from making any cuts at all, or prepare for the battle over programs that will take place in Congress over the coming years. Exploiting taxpayers’ anxieties about jobs and safety is a cynical way to avoid making tough decisions that will affect our security for decades to come.
 
 
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Learn how the "Super Committee" can exceed $1.5 trillion in cuts!
 
Going on at Taxpayer.net This Week
 
 
Solyndra Probe Continues

October 13, 5:09 PM–The Latest on the Deficit Cutting Super Committee

Bridging the Gap: Redirecting Investments to Fix the Nation’s Bridges

It’s Time to Rethink the Stillwater Bridge

Deal May Increase Transportation Spending, But at What Cost?

TCS Earmark Databases

TCS Preliminary Earmark Analysis for FY 2011

Download FY2010 Earmark Database

Earmark Frequently Asked Questions

TCS in the News

TCS was cited in dozens of stories this past week. Check them all out in the Headlines About TCS section of our website.

Notable Quote  
 
"The sequester that was built behind this is ugly, and it was meant to be ugly so that no one would go there. I don’t underestimate how hard it’s going to be to come to an agreement by the so-called super committee, but we have to get to one." 
 
-     House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio  (ABC News)

From: Weekly Wastebasket www.taxpayer.net

by Brendan Fischer

Wisconsin Republicans, without going on-the-record with a vote, have used a legislative trick to block an election board rule that would have shed light on the corporate interests laundering election spending through front groups. The move echoes the American Legislative Exchange Council agenda and will likely ensure a flood of secret ads and robo-calls for Wisconsin’s 2012 elections.

Read this article on PR Watch. http://www.prwatch.org/node/11026

Mac McClelland / Mother Jones

A look inside John Kasich’s Ohio, where workers make minimum wage, live under threat of layoff, and many spend every day on the verge of desperation.

October 24, 2011

The decor of Erin and Anthony Rodriguez’s guest room could really only happen in the United States. In fact, a European did lay eyes on it one time, and his superior brow furrowed instantly with disbelief as he said, "What…is THAT?" It isn’t just the powder-pinkness of the third bedroom in their Gahanna, Ohio, home. It’s more the hot pink stars stenciled along the ceiling border, and that between them alternate the words "Katie" and "an American Girl." Erin, who’s 30, Ohio born and raised, Ohio for life, can’t decide herself if she should be excited—I mean, it’s not not funny—or mildly embarrassed to show it to people. Nobody named Katie lives here. This paint scheme was left by the previous owners. On the early June afternoon when I drop my suitcase by the bed, Erin exclaims, "You can be our Katie!"

We’ve been roommates before. But that was back when we went to Ohio State, from which we graduated almost 10 years ago. Now Erin has a grown-up job as a public school teacher and a husband who’s a public information specialist for the Ohio agency that keeps tabs on local utilities and makes sure they don’t go all Enron on consumers. They have a baby, Jocelyn, who is extremely cute and well behaved, as well as a gray cat named Princess Vespa and a black cat named Barack Obama. For a long time, my contact with Erin has been limited mostly to occasional phone check-ins during which we brief each other on, like, how adulthood is going. Now I’m taking up temporary residence here not as a fun former roomie but as a reporter. I write Erin a rent check for a third of the mortgage—$430. She says she’s really happy to see me, even though she knows the grown-up reporter reason I’m here is that she and her husband are state employees, so something bad is bound to happen to them in the next month. That $430, she tells me, might make an important difference in their finances soon.

…

READ MORE http://www.alternet.org/ …/

In a Politico op-ed, Steve Forbes defended the taxpayer subsidies enjoyed by oil and gas companies with a series of false claims that echo industry talking points.

Read More

http://mediamatters.org/research/201110280022?lid=1183804&rid=64387687